


Prince of Shattered Glass

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Snape does care what happens to Harry.





	Prince of Shattered Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, and I make no money from this.

He’d been dreading the day, but he knew it had to happen eventually. Little boys grow up, after all.

Severus had grown up. He’d been a boy, playing with Lily at the park, one day. They’d played all day and smiled and he had known someone who was just like him, someone special. 

He had wished that day could last forever, that he could hold on to it and never let it flutter from his hands.

Years later, he learned that there was indeed a way, though it was a half-truth, a mirage he couldn’t quite get back inside. 

Dumbledore had kept him updated. He shouldn’t have had that sick swell of satisfaction when he found out about Petunia and her husband raising the child. He could remember Petunia when she was a child herself – proud and snooty on the outside, such a frightened kitten on the inside. Petunia, ha, they should have named her after a shrinking violet.

Or perhaps, Snape thought, some kind of a weed.

He had waited for someone to float the idea, even half-heartedly, of him taking in the child himself. Only for a few years, of course, to teach him the important things he would need to know. Snape told himself that he would have been able to get over the memory, get over the rush of hatred he felt when he thought about Lily being taken away from him, twice, over and over again. 

He could be a better person. Those were the words that he would say, words that he would try to believe.

But of course no one suggested it, and the boy was raised by Muggles. He knew how well that was bound to work out – they never understood and they sought to destroy what they feared; which was everything they didn’t understand, 

He began to pace his classroom. A new batch of students, and most of them likely didn’t know a damn thing about anything at all. Even his own House, Slytherin, had been a complete waste in the last few years, all bluster and talk with no action or actual promise behind anything that they did.

A little voice in his head reminded him that the boy could very well be placed in Slytherin. What would that mean, he wondered. That the boy showed promise, or that he was going to be another disappointment to be hand held for seven years and then released out into the wizarding world to accomplish nothing of value?

Lucius Malfoy had already been bragging about his own child, young Draco. Perhaps Lucius would have been better off actually seeing what the boy could do without telling everyone he was going to be the heir of Slytherin, or better.

“Severus?” the voice behind him startled him, and that in turn annoyed him. He didn’t appreciate being snuck up on and he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be snuck up on.

He hadn’t, for a very long time, since he was old enough to stop someone in their tracks if they tried.

He grumbled and looked to see Minerva McGonagall. It always felt as if she were watching him, watching for him to do something that would show he was as bad as she had clearly always pegged him to be. 

“Yes, Professor McGonagall.” He didn’t enjoy the way she had said his name, as if she had earned the right to call him by his first name.

There were precious few people who had earned that right, and most of them were dead, cold in their graves, never to say his name again. 

His mother had been so pretty in her way, even though she had never smiled and always seemed beaten down. And she had been gone the third summer away from Hogwarts, and he had never come back there. 

He had found places to go, places that he was sure Dumbledore’s watchful eye couldn’t follow him. 

But Lily never followed him, either. He would drift by her home and want to make all the windows shatter, to take her away from that perfect home with the parents who smiled all the time and always seemed to be laughing. It was unnatural.

Lily would never follow him.

And he would never follow her again.

***

“Potter, you simply aren’t paying attention,” Snape snarled. “You have to fight. The Dark Lord will go into your mind and rip you apart from the inside out if you aren’t careful.”

A pathway into Potter’s brain, that was all the Dark Lord needed to be able to harness not only his own power but whatever power the boy was sitting on as well. And then all Hell would break loose upon the Wizarding World. The streets would run with blood… a child was their only hope. They were all doomed.

A surly, impudent child who refused to listen to advice and was determined to go out on his own.

“What do you care? I’m pretty sure you’re on his side, anyway!” Harry Potter snapped back at him, throwing a fist into his hip and stalking away. Snape could see the rage on his face and he could understand it – that was the way you felt when the world wasn’t fair, when fate kept throwing you more than you could ever hope to handle.

But he’d have to learn how. Snape had had to learn how. He had been thirteen and he had been going back to Hogwarts again with a big smile on his face when his father had walked in and slammed the glass door so hard it had shattered at Severus’ feet.

He had wanted to use magic then, banned or not, had wanted to be brave enough to pick up the little shards in his mind’s eye and make them move, make them hover, make them…

Had the boy ever felt that way living with his hideous aunt and uncle? Petunia must have grown into a horrible woman from the horrible little girl she’d once been.

He could ask him; he could try to find commonalities – he didn’t have to look far for them. But every time he looked at his face he saw… 

Defeat. 

A black, black hole of defeat that was ready to swallow him hole.

***

He did not speak to the other professors when he ate, but instead listened to the conversations going on around him. Some child was lagging behind in one’s class, would the Head of House knock some sense into them? The House Cup was fast approaching, who was going to volunteer to help with preparations?

It was simply noise as he considered, again, what there was to do about the boy. He had to be protected, that much was certain, but the fact that he was in ever-present danger made it difficult. He refused to listen to reason. He was ruled by his heart rather than his head, even when a logical assessment was the only way for him to keep from getting himself killed at every turn.

He had a direct connection to the Dark Lord…

Perhaps Potter was more like Voldemort than anyone would care to admit, Dumbledore most of all. They did have those… similarities, that no one dared to speak of. 

Snape was sure that if he went back far enough, all of the greatest wizards had something a little bit wrong with them, after all. Happy wizards never needed something to turn the crank, they were content to sit at home magically turning their lights on and off and smiling as their wizard children received their letter to Hogwarts.

What a joke, what a mess. That had never been him, and that was where his mother had gone wrong so many years ago.

***

He didn’t know much of the story. Eileen had never been the one to talk about her own family, or her time at Hogwarts, or much at all actually.  
All he had found were a few photographs of her, hands at her sides and unsmiling, swaying back and forth as if waiting for the photography to be done already so she could get back to doing what she was doing. 

She had no friends, as far as Snape had known, and she hadn’t gotten along well with most of the people in her House. The last part was speculation based on what little he had found once he went searching – no professor in Slytherin had reacted to the mention of Eileen Prince’s name with anything less than scorn. 

He hadn’t seen her since the day he graduated Hogwarts. He had gone home for ten minutes to put his things in a bag and take them to his new flat.

She had been sitting in the middle of a recliner, smoking a cigarette and gazing at him with a blank sort of look.

“So, you’ve done it then. Off into the world, aren’t you, Severus?”

Snape looked at her, not sure what he wanted her to say. Maybe he wanted her to tell him that she was sorry, that she should have been there for him more, that she should have guided him and held him and all of the motherly stuff she was expected to do.

Another part of him wondered if she simply wanted her to say that she was proud of him, that she would be a successful wizard and that she knew he would always succeed in the end. That he was ambitious, just like her.

“I’ve graduated,” he said simply, “I don’t know exactly what’s next, but I’ve had a few… offers.”

There had not been any offers, save for one. An offer that he knew he was going to accept. An offer he knew that he had to accept.

He could hear his calling ringing in his ears. A calling to be a part of greatness. He knew it was what his mother wanted.

Then why couldn’t he find the strength to tell her what he had decided?

“It might be a little while before I can come back, Mother,” he said instead. “But I want you to know… thank you.”

“Thank you for what?” She cocked her head to the side. 

“Nothing, Mother,” Snape replied. “I’ll see you soon.”

***

He never saw her again. In the chaos that came along with the Dark Lord’s rise to power, no one much noticed Eileen Snape slowly slipping away and being buried in a quiet corner of the Earth.

Snape didn’t have much time to think about it, anyway. There was Lily to be worried about. They hadn’t spoken in years, but that hadn’t meant that she had left his dreams.

Perhaps when she saw how powerful he had become… perhaps things would be different. Even though she was Muggle-born… he would make an exception. He could listen to reason.

The Dark Lord was nothing if not reasonable, even though he was a little drunk on power.

That was a motivation that Snape would always be able to understand. The rush that it brought to his heart when he turned the tables, when he was the one laughing instead of the one being laughed at.

He had tried to explain it to Lily so many times, but maybe she would understand now, now when there was no other choice but to embrace the darkness and ambition and the perfect clarity of it all.

And then, in the dust, she was gone. The empire he’d thought he was helping build had crumbled in a puff of smoke.

And all that was left was the boy. 

***

“Again, Potter. We need to do it again.”

Insipid, slipshod waste of a student. 

“Potter, the Dark Lord will burn you into a hole in the ground.”

He had come back, too; it was funny how the same monsters kept filling the same holes in Snape’s brain. He could picture Nagini slipping in one eye and out the other, nestling in Snape’s memories. No magic could prevent the inevitable end.

But he could save the boy.

“Again, Potter… again.”


End file.
